TIMELINE

Jan 21, 1924
Lenin dies, likely from a stroke. Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee, ascends to greater power.

January 11, 1928
Stalin exiles his main political opponent, Leon Trotsky, leader of the Left Opposition and founder and former commander of the Red Army.

1928
With complete control over the Soviet Union, Stalin launches his first Five Year Plan (1928-1933) to rapidly industrialize the vast empire and collectivize agriculture, disrupting centuries of farming practices and communities of farmers. Unrealistic and aggressive quotas for workers and farmers are set along with repressive, brutal means of enforcing them. Penalties include arrest and/or death by shooting.

1929
Repression of the Ukrainian intelligentsia increases with the targeting and persecution of potential resistance leaders. Around 700 suspected members of the resistance are arrested and condemned in show trials. They are accused of working toward establishing an independent Ukraine with local farmers and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (an Orthodox church independent from Moscow). The church’s leaders are imprisoned or executed and the church is destroyed.

1929-1930
With some of the most fertile soil in the world known as “black earth” or chornózem, Ukraine has a rich history of farming. “Kulak” is the term for independent farmers — land-owning peasants wealthy enough to hire and manage farm labor. They put up fierce resistance to Stalin’s forced collectivization — the Kremlin’s consolidation of private farms into government owned and operated collective farms. In his ruthless campaign of “de-kulakization,” Stalin sends over 1.5 million Ukrainian farmers and their families to Siberia. Kulaks and those suspected of being kulaks are either executed or sent to concentration camps, their property confiscated.

May 1932
New York Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty wins the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles published in 1931 on Stalin’s Five Year Plan. The front page of the New York Times, quoting the Pulitzer Committee’s announcement, proudly boasts: “Mr. Duranty’s dispatches show a profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia and of the causes of those conditions. They are marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity, and are excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence.”

July 1932
During his campaign for president, New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt summons Duranty to the Governor’s Mansion to discuss the issue of the U.S. granting the Soviet Union formal recognition, a position FDR would support as president. The U.S. had not established official ties with the Kremlin in part due to the Russian Revolution, which violently overthrew the czar, killing him and his family, as well as over the fear of the spread of communism. Duranty goes on to publish articles supporting closer ties between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, urging that the U.S. make the first move.

1932
Stalin lays the groundwork for what becomes a widespread famine that further weakens and breaks any resistance to collectivization and political repression generally. This is set in motion with unrealistic grain procurements: 40% of the harvest must be handed over to the government with little leftover to feed the local villages. Soldiers and secret police agents carry out Stalin’s orders, seizing the grain on farms and searching homes for food. Famine refugees leave the rural areas for cities in Russia and Belarus, where they beg for food. Over a third of villages in Ukraine become unproductive as well as many in the Kuban, which are denied food and manufactured goods. Soldiers cordon off the villages and leave people to die.

April 23, 1932
Ukraine’s remaining independent literary organizations are destroyed.

August 7, 1932
The Kremlin intensifies its repression campaign by passing the “kolhosp property decree”: anyone caught stealing even as much as a single grain of wheat will be shot on sight. Starving peasants risk death sneaking onto collective farms at night to steal grain to feed their families. The people are left to eat their cattle, horses, their pets–animals that are starving as well – and any remaining food for their animals. Dirt, grass, twigs, bark, whatever can be foraged, are eaten. Some people resort to cannibalism.

December 14, 1932
Stalin calls a meeting of his top leaders of Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western (Smolensk) District of Moscow. He admonishes them for, as he sees it, failing to root out Ukrainian resistance leaders and networks that he claims persist in organizing against the Kremlin throughout the collective farms. While Stalin’s fears may not have been founded, the meeting nonetheless produces a secret decree to redouble efforts to destroy any and all Ukrainian resistance movements. Ukrainian leadership in the Community Party is purged and gradually replaced by non-Ukrainians.

1933
Ukraine, the Kuban, and the Caucasus experience widespread starvation. The writer Arthur Koestler, who would go on to write the dystopian novel Darkness at Noon, spent winter 1932-1933 in Kharkiv, then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and witnessed the begging famine refugees when he traveled by train: “[…] the stations were lined with begging peasants with swollen hands and feet, the women holding up to the carriage-windows horrible infants with enormous wobbling heads, stick-like limbs, swollen, pointed bellies.”

Early January 1933
British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, originally enthusiastic and sympathetic to the Soviet experiment, publishes an article in the Manchester Guardian exposing the harsh treatment of farmers forced into collectivization. The article is published anonymously: Muggeridge does not include his byline.

January 22nd, 1933
Kharkiv receives a secret directive from Stalin to close the borders of Ukraine and the Kuban to prevent starving famine refugees from fleeing. In a matter of weeks, around a quarter of a million are arrested, many shot or sent to concentration camps in Siberia. The Kremlin denies appeals from the Red Cross and Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna to send famine relief and aid.

January 30, 1933
Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany. During his campaign, Hitler gave speeches against his communist opponents, blasting the Soviets for starving their own citizens. German Mennonite colonies in Ukraine had been early witnesses of the famine, and the then free German press published early reports.

February 1933
William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News and Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune visit the famine-terrorized areas and report on the catastrophe of forced collectivization. Their trip into the famine ravaged areas lead to the Soviets instating a travel ban to the region.

March 1933
Hitler begins building his first concentration camp, in Dachau, Germany.

March 5, 1933
The young independent journalist and former foreign advisor to World War I prime minister and Welsh statesman David Lloyd George, Gareth Jones arrives in Ukraine, his third trip since 1930, to continue his reporting on the Five Year Plan with a special focus on the agricultural situation. He convinces the Soviet authorities to allow him to visit factors in Kharkiv only to elude his state guide and travel by foot through the famine ravaged villages, interviewing survivors.

March 11, 1933
British engineers in Moscow from the British firm Metro-Vickers are arrested during a night raid. The arrest of British citizens is a shock and highly unusual considering that the firm works with Soviet engineers to help build and expand factories in Russia. UK-Russian diplomatic relations, while tense, had been established since 1924. The arrest of the British engineers strains already tense relations between the UK and Russia, and could put U.S. diplomatic recognition at risk.

March 29, 1933
On his way home to London, Jones holds a press conference in Berlin. He receives interview requests from the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Allied Newspapers, the Press Association and a commission from the Daily Express.

Late March 1933
Muggeridge publishes articles about the famine in the Manchester Guardian

One night at the very end of March, following Jones’ press conference, Eugene Lyons, a Moscow correspondent for the newswire United Press International (UPI) joins a group of Western reporters in a suite of Moscow’s Metropole Hotel. The host for the evening is Walter Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow bureau chief for the New York Times, and they are joined by chief Soviet censor Konstantin Umansky who promises the reporters access to the Metro-Vickers trial in exchange for publishing articles calling Jones a liar.

As Lyons goes on to write about that night in his 1937 memoir Assignment in Utopia:

“We all received urgent queries from our home offices on the subject [of the famine]. But the inquiries coincided with the preparations under way for the trial of the British engineers. The need to remain on friendly terms with the censors at least for the duration of the trial was for all of us compelling professional necessity.

Throwing down Jones was a unpleasant a chore as fell to any of us in years of juggling the facts to please dictatorial regimes—but throw him down we did, unanimously and in almost identical formulas of equivocation….

The scene in which the American press corps combined to repudiate Jones is fresh in my mind. It was in the evening and Comrade Umansky, the soul of graciousness, consented to meet us in the hotel room of a correspondent. He knew he had a strategic advantage over us because of the Metro-Vickers story. He could afford to be gracious. Forced by competitive journalism to jockey for the inside track with officials, it would have been professional suicide to make an issues of the famine at this particular time. There was much bargaining in a spirit of gentlemanly give-and- take, under the effulgence of Umansky’s gilded smile, before a formula of denial was worked out.

We admitted enough to soothe our consciences, but in round-about phrases that damned Jones as a liar. The filthy business having been disposed of, someone ordered vodka and zakuski, Umansky joined in the celebration, and the party did not break up until the early morning hours.”

March 31, 1933
Jones publishes “Famine Rules Russia” in the London Evening Standard, his first of 21 articles he will write in the coming weeks about the famine. That same day, Duranty publishes in the New York Times: “Russians Hungry, But Not Starving.” The lead paragraph calls Jones’ claim “a big scare story with ‘thousands already dead and millions menaced by death and starvation.’ Its author is Gareth Jones.” As Ray Gamache argues in his book Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor, Duranty, given his fame and trusted reputation, contributed to muddling the truth of Stalin’s famine for many years to come: “By denigrating Jones by name, Duranty, the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1932, not only denied that a famine was raging across the USSR, but he also ignited a controversy that has persisted for eighty years.”

April 12, 1933
The six British engineers for Metro-Vickers are put on a show trial in Moscow, accused of sabotage, bribery, and espionage for the British government. The plight of the British engineers in Moscow captures the world’s attention.

April 19, 1933
Four of the British engineers — Monkhouse, Cushny, Nordwall, and Gregory — are expelled from the Soviet Union upon the trial’s conclusion on April 19. The two British engineers who had made confessions — Leslie Thornton and W.H. MacDonald — are sentenced to three and two-year sentences but are eventually released in July 1933.

June to July 1933
The groundwork of the famine has left in its wake a severely weakened and traumatized population across Ukraine. During this month alone, around 28,000 Ukrainians die per day. In one stunning illustration of the genocide, a death certificate from 1933 lists the cause of death as simply “Ukrainian.”

September 1933
The six month ban on foreign journalists visiting Ukraine is lifted. Duranty travels south with the AP correspondent Stanley Richardson and publishes reports from his trip in articles titled “Soviet is Winning Faith of Peasants,” “Members Enriched in Soviet Commune,” and “Abundance Found in North Caucasus.” Back in Moscow after his trip, Duranty meets with British diplomats and doesn’t hold back the disturbing details. In private Duranty contradicts his own reporting, as relayed in a September 30, 1933 dispatch from the British Embassy in Moscow:

According to Mr. Duranty the population of the North Caucasus and the Lower Volga had decreased in the past year by three million, and the population of the Ukraine by four to five million. The Ukraine has been bled white … Mr. Duranty thinks it quite possible that as many as ten million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.

November 16, 1933
President Franklin Roosevelt ends nearly 16 years of no diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union by finally granting Stalin’s Kremlin official diplomatic recognition.

December 25, 1933
Stalin grants Duranty a second exclusive interview.

1934
“Stunned by the Duranty-orchestrated denials and shunned by some of the people who had supported him, Gareth Jones fell from his brief stay in the international spotlight during his tenure as a reporter with the Western Mail.” –Ray Gamache, Gareth Jones: Eyewitness to the Holodomor

January 1, 1935
Jones visits the opulent ranch of San Simeon, California belonging to newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, whom he had first met in an interview when Hearst was based at his Welsh estate St. Donat’s Castle. Jones gives Hearst three articles to publish on the famine, which Hearst does in January 12-14 as part of his larger anti-Communist coverage. Unfortunately, in his eagerness to expose Soviet atrocities, Hearst’s newspapers also publish several fabricated articles and fake photographs from Thomas Walker, the alias of the escaped convict Robert Green. This is exposed by Louis Fischer of The Nation and only creates doubts and confusion over the famine, helping relegate it to a little known and often misunderstood genocide for decades.

Holodomor Denial

The Media Cover-Up of the Holodomor

There are several sources from the era that capture the immense pressure and self-censorship experienced by foreign journalists covering Stalin’s Soviet Union. UPI reporter Eugene Lyons provides a stunning account in his 1937 memoir Assignment in Utopia, reviewed by George Orwellhere. (From Lyons’ book, Orwell borrowed 2+2=5 for his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four). In one chapter, Lyons describes how leading journalists in the Western press in Moscow, including Lyons himself, banned together to cover-up the Holodomor in exchange for greater press access from the Kremlin. That chapter is aptly titled: “The Press Corps Conceals a Famine,” For more on that stunning orchestration of a cover-up by Western reporters and Soviet censors, listen to this interview with Nigel Colley, the great-nephew of Gareth Jones, the independent journalist who worked hard to expose the famine only to be targeted by this cover-up in an attempt to discredit his reporting.

The passage below from the memoirs of Zara Witkin, a Russian-born American who went to work in the USSR as an engineer, paints a bleak picture of Western journalistic integrity in Moscow under Stalin:

The Memoirs of Zara Witkin 1932–1934

A scene from late 1933 excerpted from Chapter XXII

“In Moscow, the foreign correspondents, watching this unprecedented, grim process, asked each other repeatedly if it were possible for a nation to raise food with bayonets. With the stories of starvation pouring into the capital, and engineers and travellers from south Russia telling of dead bodies lying in the roads, the correspondents prepared to visit these areas and see the conditions at first hand. [A reporter for United Press International Eugene] Lyons returned from Italy on August 21. He immediately requested permission to visit the Ukraine and North Caucasus. The other correspondents did likewise. All were denied the privilege by the Soviet Government. This was the first time that correspondents had been barred from a civilian area in peace-time. The government had adopted a policy of concealment!

Lyons then asked the Soviet Foreign Office to select an area for him to visit—one which they were satisfied to have him see as an example. This recalled the notorious historical incident of General Potemkin, the favorite of the Empress Catherine, who hurriedly built the false ‘happy villages’ in the countryside along the route she was to take, to conceal from her the misery of the masses. This request was also denied. William Henry Chamberlin, the soft-spoken, hard-thinking correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor, who had for years taken walking trips in the Caucasus during his vacation, was now also barred from that area. While the correspondents were bottled up in Moscow, the government proceeded with its desperate effort to bring in the harvest and avoid the recurrence of the starvation early in the year. The wildest rumors of death by famine and terrible suffering of millions had reached the outside world. In a vague way the world was aware of the horrible famine which was destroying millions of lives. But the Kremlin had succeeded in confusing the issue through alibis, lying denials and frantic secrecy. The fuming American correspondents, prevented from getting or sending any of this grave news, met to consider the situation. The conference was held in the home of Ralph Barnes [of the Herald Tribune]. Walter Duranty [of the New York Times], Eugene [Lyons of UPI], [writer] Maurice Hindus, who happened to be in Moscow, and William Stoneman of the ChicagoDaily News were present while I was there. Chamberlin, Louis Fischer of the New York Nation, Stanley Richardson of the Associated Press, and Linton Wells of International News Service had been there earlier. Barnes put the question. What should be done? Their duty was to ‘get the news,’ to which access was denied by the Soviet Government. Barnes turned first to Lyons.

‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. (I knew that Lyons felt keenly about the suffering of which he was amply informed.)

‘I want to send this story,’ Lyons replied, ‘but I am blocked. I have evaded the censorship several times by telephoning ‘out.’ My agency has asked me not to antagonize the government by doing this any more. With the Soviet Government barring investigation, the censorship stopping all dispatches and my own agency not backing me, I am helpless!’

Barnes then turned to Duranty. ‘What are you going to write?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ answered Duranty. ‘What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated. Anyhow, we cannot write authoritatively because we are not permitted to go and see. I’m not going to write anything about it.’ At this brutal cynicism, Lyons and Stoneman flared up. Duranty merely shrugged his shoulders and smiled, then turned to Mrs. Barnes to resume his brilliant conversation that had been so unpleasantly interrupted.

‘What are you going to write, Hindus?’ Barnes asked. ‘I am not in the same position as you men are,’ Hindus replied. ‘I do not write for a daily journal. I do not have to send any dispatches. I am a novelist. Besides, as you know, I was permitted to enter Russia this time on my definite pledge not to visit the villages. My visa was granted solely on that basis. Also, since I have not seen these conditions myself, I cannot write authoritatively about them.’

‘I propose,’ said Barnes, ‘that we demand, as a group, the permission to see these conditions.’

Stoneman and Lyons immediately expressed approval. Duranty and Hindus made it clear, however, that there could be no unanimous action. It was also recalled that Fischer, of The Nation, would not support any such suggestion. A queer light played in Barnes’ eyes and his football chin stuck out. He left the room abruptly. The other correspondents continued to converse. Under the friendly spell of Mrs. Barnes’ hospitality the ugly question was temporarily relegated to the background. Suddenly Barnes re-entered the room. His face was flushed with excitement. ‘I shot the story!’ he announced.

Consternation reigned in the room. Barnes had telephoned a sizzling dispatch about the famine despite the restrictions of the censorship. ‘What did you send?’ the men chorused. ‘I estimated the deaths by starvation to be at least a million.’ The meeting broke up at once. Barnes’ message could not fail to have the gravest consequences abroad in world opinion for the Soviet Union, and upon the correspondents themselves. The reaction, as expected, was immediate. The New York Herald-Tribune carried front-page headlines. Every paper in America queried its correspondent at once for confirmation of the frightful story. The august New York Times sent a strong message to Duranty, which in effect demanded profanely where he was when these terrible conditions were developing and why he had remained silent.

The situation forced the hand of every correspondent. They had to confirm Barnes’ daring dispatch. The Soviet Foreign Office immediately summoned Barnes and threatened him with expulsion from the Soviet Union. But the confirming dispatches of the other correspondents were now pouring across the Atlantic. Duranty the next morning in his cablegram estimated three million dead ‘of causes due to malnutrition,’ the now notorious euphemism which he coined for the famine. The Soviet Government had to expel all the American correspondents en masse, or let Barnes stay. In this dilemma it had only one practical course. The antagonism of the entire American press was too great a risk to run. Barnes remained in the U.S.S.R. on sufferance.”

HOLODOMOR

UKRAINE GENOCIDE

1932-33

US Committee for Ukrainian Holodomor-Genocide Awareness

Ukraine Genocide – Holodomor

Holodomor Denial

TIMELINE

Holodomor Denial

The Media Cover-Up of the Holodomor

The Memoirs of Zara Witkin 1932–1934

Further Reading